Magazine | Mar 29, 2004
PLAY
Yoni Speak
A play on women's sexuality. Is it about empowerment or another socialite affair?
SAUMYA ROY
"Obviously Madras has no vaginas. If Madras has no vaginas it must be full of a***holes." -Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal, director-actress, on The Vagina Monologues being banned in Chennai.
Each side seems to be going for the shock and awe approach, in this latest battleground in the battle of the sexes.
Although Eve Ensler's seminal play The Vagina Monologues has experience with getting equally vehement responses in every direction, it has notched up a whole lifetime's worth of them in two weeks of its showings in Mumbai and Delhi. Apart from being banned by the Chennai police, it has drawn packed houses, celebrity waiting lists, kind of aligned Pooja Bedi and Shiv Sena moral policeman Pramod Navalkar on the same side, had women up in arms against the ban and even provoked its first play in male response.
And while responses to the play have been, like George W. Bush's characterisation of his presidential opponent, John Kerry, on every side of an issue, the banning of the play has left the Chennai police isolated. The play, which recounts women's experiences with coming to terms with their sexuality including being sexually abused, has been performed across the planet and banned in some countries, including most recently in China because there is no non-abusive word for vagina in Chinese.
Several Indian film actresses turned down parts in the play. "What would they tell their parents and producers," says Kaizad Kotwal, the play's producer. "Here we pretend these things (female sexuality) don't exist and we don't talk of them," says writer and publisher Urvashi Butalia. In Delhi, Mody-Kotwal got requests to call the play a V-day celebration instead of Vagina Monologues, which she turned down. All this, while "music video models are telling us how to dress and where to invest," says singer Shubha Mudgal. "It is disgusting the way women's bodies are used in music videos etc but just because they don't use the word vagina there, they are not banned."
Women, many of whom have watched the play and found it uplifting, say banning is an extreme response to a play that clearly identifies itself as adult fare. "Surely, people don't go to see Vagina Monologues thinking it's about gardening. They are making a choice in seeing the play and no one has the right to stop them. There are no taboos in a democracy," says actress-turned-columnist Pooja Bedi. So adman Alyque Padamsee has taken the democratic route of directing a male riposte to The Monologues. Complete with a condom company sponsorship, Padamsee's play will show in Mumbai next month. His play, the P-Dialogues, will have women and men and will be dialogues not monologues. Filmmaker Mahesh Manjrekar is also said to be planning a movie, coincidentally called Vaginal Truths. Although the play was banned because the Chennai police said it could "disrupt public peace", writer Shobha De says: "I don't see how blood would have spilled on the streets if this play was screened."
But banning the play could well be a masterstroke in getting women with virulently different reactions to the play together. The debate on whether the play should have been banned are skewed but on reactions to the play, there are nearly as many views as there are people. Most of the reservations have come from the use of the word vagina in the title. Before the play begins, Mody-Kotwal asks the audience to whisper the word, then collectively say it louder and louder, till they are primed up for the performance.
"Eventually everyone joins in," she says. She does a passage on an aging Parsi woman's memory of her glory days, others relive their experience with child birth, sexual abuse; in Bombay, Oscar-winning actress Marisa Tomei read a piece on her right to wear a short skirt and not be harassed.
Mody-Kotwal and Ensler, who is at the head of the global V-Day (V stands for victory, Valentine and Vagina) movement that raises money and awareness against sexual abuse, say the vagina is a medical term and the heart of life and abuse, so why the shame in saying it. "Why this censorship and self-censorship on saying what is a part of a woman's body?" asks poetess Imtiaz Dharker. Sandhya Gokhale of the Forum Against Oppression of Women says the use of the word vagina publicly starts a dialogue where there is none. "In the '80s, when we started campaigning against rape, that was a banned word."
But yelling "vagina" isn't exactly the pinnacle of women's empowerment, say others. "It has nothing to do with women's empowerment. I would rather have my mouth talk than parts of my body," asserts De. She thinks using the word vagina gives the play shock value and publicity but it's just tokenism. Says Bedi: "It's all okay to watch it in the theatre but it is distasteful to have a worldwide movement called Vagina Day!" She wrote in her column that although she liked the play, she thinks brandishing it outside the theatre is similar to "men scratching their private parts in public". Padamsee has called his play P-Dialogues to ensure it doesn't offend sensibilities. But Kotwal says he is "skirting the issue".
And the controversy has brought public spotlight on the kind of event that is followed by cocktails and seen by page three guests. "It is offensive to link women's empowerment to this. This is a nice excuse to party, it's not about a cause," says De. She says if they really wanted to talk about sexual abuse, the play should have been staged in Mumbai's mega-slum
Dharavi, in Hindi or Marathi. Having svelte women in new-age intellectual's fashion accessories like thick-framed glasses, like Ensler, read prose celebrating the Indian woman's comfort with being fat to women who vacillate between eating nothing and doing the fashionable South Beach diet, may just be adding to the list of cool things to do. Surely Ensler must not have collected the experiences of her Mumbai audience, many of whom only associate with Jane Fonda, who also read excerpts, with her aerobics tapes, when she wrote in Jadi that Indian women enjoy being fat because some fat is vital to holding the sari in place.
"A westernised English audience is used to seeing all kinds of things. This is infotainment for them," Padamsee says. The play will have a different sensibility if it was taken to a larger audience, he says. And while ladies who lunch in south Bombay and south Delhi may watch it to push the frontiers of cool and may redirect the dialogue on abuse, there was Aishwarya Rai at the showing.